The lone woman who staged a ‘No Kings’ protest in small-town West Virginia

When Kendra Sullivan woke up on Wednesday, the 43-year-old West Virginian was surprised to see that she’d gone viral overnight — in a good way.

The night before, more than 40,000 people had joined YouTube for a what’s-next meeting following the 2,700 “No Kings” pro-democracy demonstrations on Saturday attended by as many as 7 million across the country. The livestream was organized by the same broad coalition of good-government, religious and advocacy groups that arranged the protests. Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an Appalachian activist and the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director at the Highlander Research & Education Center, a social justice leadership school in Tennessee that dates back to the Civil Rights Movement, revved up participants by showing photos they’d submitted of Saturday’s events. 

She shared a dispatch from Chattanooga, Tennessee, “my hometown, the town I was born in,” Henderson said, where “over 2,000 people came out to declare that Appalachians don’t lick boots and that ICE belongs in sweet tea, not in Tennessee!” 

She thanked the thousands of people who marched in Washington for “holding down this resistance movement right on Trump’s freaking doorstep.” She gave a shoutout to senior citizens at an assisted living center in White Plains, New York, whose protest drew 350 people from 2 to 102 years old. She also relayed that pouring rain did not stop 8,000 people in Fort Worth, Texas, from “turning out to say that we see this administration for what it is, and we will not stand for rising fascism.”

Then, as the call drew to a close, Henderson concluded with a Saturday demonstration that was notable for its attendance — a single person: Sullivan.  

“And last but not least, in Beckley, West Virginia, Kendra Sullivan staged a one-woman ‘No Kings’ action. Y’all didn’t hear me. I’m gonna say it one more time: In Beckley, West Virginia, Kendra Sullivan — shout out to Kendra Sullivan! — staged a one-woman ‘No Kings’ action. People confronted her. They called the cops on her. They physically threatened her, but she stayed, and she stood up for what she believed in. Kendra, we are with you,” Henderson said.

Sullivan wasn’t on Tuesday night’s call. But on Wednesday, she started seeing messages from people who’d heard about her protest during Henderson’s roundup. 

“The majority are people I’ve never met, I’m not Facebook friends with and have no connection to,” Sullivan told The 19th. “I just read a message from a woman who said, ‘You make me feel so much less alone.’ Lots of them feel like a tiny blue speck in a red state.”

She never anticipated it, she said — “I forget about the power of the Internet.” On Saturday, though, “I felt pretty lonely.” 

Sullivan knew that she’d attend a “No Kings” event on Saturday. She described herself as more politically engaged than the average person and said she has participated in past events, but had no idea until she woke up that morning that it would be a one-woman stand.

On Friday, after work, she’d driven the two-plus hours from where she lives in Clarksburg, West Virginia, to Beckley, where she grew up, a city of about 16,000 in the southern part of the state. Her mother was headed out of town on a “girls trip” to Bermuda, Sullivan said, and had asked her to look after her dogs. 

“I knew that there wasn’t a ‘No Kings’ rally in Beckley, so initially I thought I’d go to one in Charleston or Fayetteville or Lewisburg, but all of that was going to require more travel for me when I’d already driven two hours to dog sit for my mom,” Sullivan explained. 

On Saturday, she woke up and told herself, “You know what? My mom lives off basically a main drive through town, so I could just walk down, hold up my sign for an hour, and call it a day — because there was no way I wasn’t going to participate.”

Sullivan ran the idea past her father, who also lives in town; he told her it was a good plan. She put in her AirPods and grabbed her handmade signs — “This aggression will not stand, man” and “ICE? Let’s get ICE off our streets and into our beverages, man,” both references to Jeff Bridges’ character “The Dude” in the film “The Big Lebowski.” Bridges had recently appeared on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show and Sullivan found what he had to say “inspiring,” she said. She walked down the street to the main road and started “singing and dancing around on the street corner.”

Twenty minutes in, an older man came out of the house she was standing in front of and hung a sign supporting President Donald Trump. Then a police car pulled up, followed by another. “It was one of those moments of, ‘Oh my goodness, are they here for me?’ I wasn’t blocking traffic, I wasn’t cursing, I was just exercising my First Amendment rights,” Sullivan said. 

Sullivan asked if she’d done anything wrong. The first officer, a man, told her absolutely not; they were just following up on a report that had been phoned in. The second officer, a woman, had joined him because they knew the protester was a woman on her own. The officers confirmed everything was OK and left.

Ten minutes later, a car pulled into the house where the man, still on his porch, had hung the Trump sign. A younger man got out and mentioned that his grandfather was a Korean War veteran. “I said that’s cool, but that’s not ICE,” Sullivan said. He crossed the street and told her as he took photos of her: “You can smile real pretty.” 

She called 9-1-1.

The police came back, this time with a third officer. Sullivan started to cry a little. The officers, she said, “were so comforting.” They stayed with her for a half-hour or so and then went on their way. Sullivan ended up staying longer than she’d originally planned, close to two hours.

“I do know people in Beckley who went to alternate locations on Saturday, but I think you need to show your face to your actual neighbors” — or, in this case, her parents’ neighbors, as well as people she grew up with. “It’s not enough to put up a sign,” she said. “It’s important to let people know what those who don’t support this look like, that we’re just like everybody else: We are America.”